Winter Notes on Summer Impressions - post II

Dostoevsky finally starts to put down some thoughts on Paris and London. The British come out of it better than the French with their character generally liked by the Russian author.

But when he enters into a crowded street at night and is surrounded by drunks and the excesses that the British can be famous for he is horrified and scuttles back to safety.

However there is a sense of more general despair about the French with some genuine anger emerging. Dostoevsky believes in a brotherhood of man as a philosophy and believes that on the surface the French, with their proclaimed Liberty, equality and freedom would be in a good position to provide it.

What angers Dostoevsky most is the French character that is bourgeoisie to the extent that neither socialism nor a sense of Brotherhood could take route. Add to that the mistrust that the French show of foreigners, spying on them in trains and getting hotels to note down all particulars, and you have an experience that seems to leave the Russian author cold.

Mind you as he points out repeatedly many other compatriots enjoy it so there will never be a shortage of Russians in Paris.

More tomorrow…

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions - post I

The introduction by Kyril Fitzlyon sets this up in an odd way reducing your expectations from the very start.

“The neglect from which Summer Impressions has so far suffered at the hands of literary critics is due to a variety of reasons of which style is not the least. Dostoevsky, never a good stylist had at that time only a very slender experience as a journalist and he was obviously trying to evolve a way of writing that would enable him to put his ideas across in the most digestible form he could think of. Unfortunately the most digestible form he could think of was one which retained all his most glaring faults of style – repetitiveness, excessive colloquialism, discursiveness, slipshod grammar – and added two of its own: forced breeziness and waggish humour. The reader must make up his mind to disregard them. If he does, he will be amply repaid.”

Having those words echoing in your head you wonder where you go from there and the reality is nowhere very clear.

Dostoevsky opts to tell his readers why he has chosen to make a trip, something he has never done before, out of Russia visiting Germany, France and England.

But the way he tells you is more to do with Russia than the places he goes with the first three chapters sharing his thoughts on why Russians travel and what they hope to see when they get there.

“People love the West in this country; they love it and when it comes to a certain point they all go there.”

You start to yearn for a little bit of travelogue after a while wondering quite what his impressions of Europe itself have been rather than just his feelings about fellow Russians.

More tomorrow…

book review - Norwegian Wood

This was the last book I managed to squeeze in last year and as a result it ends this marathon run of reviews.

Haruki Murakami is one of those authors that occasionally flits across the radar screen because he is still alive and producing novels and as a result pops up as a topic for discussion on literary review shows. So as a result you know of him before you pick a book up but it was still unknown territory reading Norwegian Wood.

If you were to boil it down to themes it would include loneliness, despair, suicide and would be in there. But that would leave you with the impression that this is about

This book is reasonably old and has the feeling of being even older as it is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It follows the progress of Toru Wantabe who is a student who moves to Tokyo after his best friend commits suicide at the age of 17. Toru falls in love with his dead friend’s girlfriend Naoko but she is always slightly out of his grasp.

After they make love she disappears into a sanatorium and then slowly disappears from mainstream life and finally fails to stop her problems from over coming her.

In between that process Toru, who remains in college getting on with a lonely but relatively regulated life, meets Midori who is complex and challenging but the opposite from Naoko. He seems to face a choice between the two women who become the past and the future.

Part of that decision is taken out of his hands when Naoko takes a decision to disappear forever but he still cannot bring himself to embrace the future. For a while he is also in the balance and he could have easily followed his friends and taken the suicide option but he comes back to life and chooses to live and ultimately whether or not it involves Midori it is on his own terms he opts to live.

The character of Toru is a lonely but admirably determined student who is wiser than his years and as a result of having death introduced into his life at a young age has an inner strength. But he cannot live alone and the women in his life remind him of his need not so much for sexual satisfaction, he gets that from one night stands.

He requires relationships that involve love not so he can receive it but more importantly so he can give it. There is a yearning from him to be able to give love and that also comes through.

In some moments of the book it felt like a poor attempt at an erotic romance but there is a story that you stick with that is slightly autobiographical no doubt. You can only conclude that the reason it spoke to so many people is because it described the way they felt.

Choosing to live is as hard if not harder than choosing to die and that is the message that after the memories of the exact details fade will be what you take forward from this novel.

Penguin suggests 52 books for the year

Penguin has posted 52 books which it believes you should plough through this year. A good idea but having looked at the list there was not that much that was inspiring and so I will be opting for my own alternatives.

Mind you some things that do chime are the Darwin, bearing in mind the anniversary this year and the mass media coverage he will be getting. Plus And The Hippos were boiled in the tanks by William S Burroughs sounds like an experience worth going for.

Anyway see what you think by viewing the list.

book review - Beedle the Bard

Having only got through half of the Harry Potter books that factor maybe had a negative impact on reading this because J.K Rowling is writing for an audience totally immersed in her world.

As a result of not being a Potter expert you come to this cold and as a result the book has to stand and fall on its own merits. Okay so it has to be put into perspective that this is for charity and everyone knows how popular her books are so it will raise money.

As a collection of fairy tales it is not too bad but what undermined it for me were the notes that followed each story attributed to Dumbledore the headmaster of Potter’s school Hogwarts. He puts the stories into a historical context and shares the reaction to them from wizards at the time of publication.

But most of the observations he makes about the actual stories you have already realised as an adult reader and too much space is spent spelling the obvious out.

But still this is a kid’s book and it does what it should with a combination of make believe and author-penned illustrations it will take children back to the land of witches and wizards as well as helping out some of the poorest children and so for that it has to get a thumbs up and my grumpiness ceases.

book review - The Fire Engine that Disappeared

Some of these books are better than others but I am unashamed to say that I thoroughly enjoy the Martin Beck thrillers from Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.

Between them the husband and wife team manage to weave together a story that often seems to be in two halves with the crime and the misunderstanding around it taking up the first chunk before they pin it down in the second.

Interestingly the main character Martin Beck doesn’t feature a great deal in this book as the other detectives step into the spotlight and help crack a crime that at first seems to be suicide and then a crime where it will be almost impossible to find the killer.

What keeps it going of course is the determination and dedication of a handful of detectives who refuse to give in even when the odds of them getting a resolution to the crime seem to be remote.

Along with the police Sweden itself plays a role along with the weather as the cold streets of Swedish cities and docks add to the mood and the feeling of despondency.

As part of the story there is a development in Beck’s family life with the breakdown of his marriage more obvious and his daughter opting to move out and make life at home even more unbearable. But he is largely in the shadows and that is a brave move. It would be hard to imagine an Inspector Morse story where the spotlight fell wholly on Lewis and others in the department solved the crime.

But that is the difference that Sjowall and Wahloo bring along with a determination to introduce political themes of the day, in this case the rumblings of discontent against the 60s love culture and drugs.

Although it is hardly going to be put on the library shelf in the category of great literature this is a real joy to read and there are moments when reading should provide this sort of experience.

book review - Lines of Fate

This book was one of those finds in a charity shop that at first you are very please with. The blurb on the cover informs you that this won the first Russian equivalent of the Booker Prize so it is with high hopes you open the covers and delve inside. Mark Kharitonov is always in control of the experience and as a reader you never feel totally at ease in the world he describes nor did I ever really understand.

Maybe that is part of the point about this book – it is clearly meant to be difficult – with a cast of numerous characters spanning two different time lines. But in many places it was just too much like shooting fish in the dark and as a result sadly this review is probably lacking a great deal of astute comment.

What did emerge through the fog was the idea that a student was studying for his doctoral thesis but concentrating on the writings of an author who ended up living in exile.

The author not only lived in the wilderness but lacked some of the basic things like paper and resorted to writing on the back of candy wrappers, which were produced in the factory in the town he was staying in. Some of the thoughts put down on the wrappers are just single lines but they seem to speak to the student many years later.

What also seems to speak to the student is the sense of political doom that the author predicted would happen and did indeed shatter his world as the factory was closed and the estate connected with it looted and destroyed.

But in-between those moments of clarity there are meetings both in the past and present with academics and publishers that meet and influence and try to exploit both author and student. But what they also have in common seems to be a failed love affair that ends with the woman disappearing into the mists of time.

The problem with the book is that it just never gets any easier and even at the 200 page mark you are left flummoxed. I know that there is a larger debate about whether or not literature should be difficult and challenging for the reader but there is also something about it being enjoyable.

I am happy to admit that my reading is not as deep and as wide as I would like and neither is the memory that good (hence why I write things down here to remember) but for me this was one of the most difficult reads of last year.

book review - A Dead Man's Memoir (A Theatrical Novel)

The reviewing catch-up continues, and will do until next week, so here is another from the tail-end of last year.

This is a strange book that is framed with a sense of bitterness. As a writer and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov knew more than most about the tightrope that you walked in Soviet Russia. Deliver something too sycophantic and your peers would condemn you but deliver something too critical and you would be cast out into the wilderness or even worse sent through the Gulag system.

The character in this story is caught in the trap of the position of writing a book that is deemed to be not only of mediocre quality by the literary establishment but something that is also on the wrong side of the censor. But despite that situation, which drives the writer to suicide, he still manages to get his work published and is invited to put on a play.

The combination of Kafka type madness swamping the literary world and a heightened sense of politics that the writer never manages to grasp produces a nauseous feeling of madness. For instance in his play he has written in a scene involving a gun shot but the head of the theatre specifically dislikes the use of gun shots so this has to be turned into a knife being brandished. The casting is also a political minefield and the initial failure to get it right undermines support for the play among the theatrical troupe.

But if there is one thing that will stick with me from this book, which can be awkward and depressing to get through, it will be about the impact that a deeply oppressive system has on creativity.

As he starts to write the play Bulgakov describes the writer sitting down and watching characters he has invented come to life on a stage. All he has to do is curl up with them night after night and capture the dialogue and stage directions. It appears almost like magic with the writer peering over the actors as they dance around a tiny stage weaving their stories.

But as the rewrites are demanded and the pressures to please various factions get put on the writer those magical figures disappear and his writing becomes uninspired and politically motivated. He loses the soul from his work and that is ultimately the quality the attracted him to the theatre in the first place.

Although the main character can be accused of being naïve the consequences of working in a country where creativity has to meet a long list of strict requirements take their toll and reduce him to a broken man whose vision has been destroyed.

book review - The Friend of Madame Maigret

There might be a snobbishness with thrillers but there is a skill to weaving a story that is both unfathomable but equally realistic. The prolific Georges Simenon is better than most at managing to do both with a helping hand from well established characters in the form of Inspector Maigret and Paris.

Paris plays a bigger role than you might expect with the city setting the mood with its rain soaked streets and seedy bars full of gossips and informants. Then there are the hotels and brothels that provide refugee for murderers. In this case there is a carefully choreographed location with a book binder's flat and workrooms sitting on a corner looked on by a grocers and a café.

An anonymous tip-off to the police starts the investigations at the bookbinders with the binder taken into custody facing the charge of disposing of a man’s body in his furnace.

Muddying the waters is an ambitious lawyer who represents the bookbinder and the binder’s girlfriend who swears they lead a quiet life without the opportunity for murder.

The ball is already rolling when Maigret gets involved with the case and he constantly regrets not being able to start afresh and investigate it with methods that he would have deployed from the start. But the irony is that the link between the bookbinder and the murderer’s comes from Mrs Maigret who manages to meet some of the gang purely by mistake while waiting for a dental appointment.

She weaves in the occasional piece of information that Maigret ferments in his brain and finally leads to a solution. What really unlocks the mystery is Maigret’s ability to understand and predict human behaviour to the extent that he can reveal links and actions that no one else could have guessed at.

Of course he solves the case but he does so displaying great understanding and humility and shows that he is head and shoulders above most of his colleagues.

book review - A Cab at the Door

Memoirs and biography in general are not things that usually draw me and it was with a sense of having paid for it and now having to read it that I picked up this book. Beautifully produced and printed by Slighty Foxed magazine the story of his youth by V.S Prichett is delivered in a well crafted tome.

Inside the pages the story emerges of a boy becoming a man living under the dual influences of his ambitious father and rather intimidated, but within the home aggressive, mother. The story of his life is one of constant movement - The Cab at the Door – as creditors catch up with his father.

But in the home it is the mother who exerts the influence and manages to help develop a boy that has ambitions to become a writer and use his talent not just to escape from poverty but also to give himself choices.

Things settle down a bit when the family moves near Dulwich and the teenage years begin but after being pulled out of school and sent to work the dreams of academic and literary success fade dramatically.

The reason why the book works though is that there is another character in the shape of London and the City emerges as Pritchett goes to work as a dirty fog filled inspiration. The glimpses of the capital as it prepares for war in 1914 and the details of working life are things that maybe you didn’t expect to find among the personal but are really interesting.

Plus the other reason for taking away an upbeat message is that despite the difficulties he faced and the moments when he almost gave up hope of being a writer he obviously did make it and that is something for us with creative ambitions to take note of.

book review - All in the Mind

One of the phrases you often hear handed out to those that want to start writing is that you should start by writing what you know. That seems to have been Alistair Campbell’s starting point as he centres his book on a psychiatrist who is himself suffering from depression.

Campbell is of course not just well known for being Tony Blair’s spin doctor and the man who took on the BBC in the weapons of mass destruction ‘sexed-up’ document battle but also someone who suffers from the Black Dog. How do we know that? Well in recent months, no doubt aimed at helping with the eventual appearance of the book, Campbell fronted a documentary about depression.

At the centre of the web is the poor Doctor Sturrock who wants to heal the sick but is failing to look after himself. Through a roster of patients ranging from the burns victim, the alcoholic, rape victim and depressive Campbell weaves in and out of a couple of days in the doctor’s life.

Part of the problem is that half the time you wonder which character is closer to Campbell himself with the boozy politician probably close. But because of the day structure to the novel and the medical theme I couldn’t help but feel reminded of Saturday by Ian McEwan.

In terms of the outcomes of the story they are powerful enough and designed to make you think not just about mental illness but those who spend their time trying to treat it.

No doubt the focus of most readers was clouded by Campbell himself being such a personality but if anything his experience is key to the book and the baggage he has needs to be brought along to make the book work. I felt that this is one of those razor edge novels that will either mark the start of something or the end of an ambition.

It would be good if it were the latter because it would be good to see what Campbell turns up if he really started digging in his creative mine.

Review of the year part two

Review of 2008 part II – July to December

The second d half of the year started with the subject of the war continuing. On one side there was Unconditional Surrender by Evelyn Waugh and on the other A Soldier’s Art by Anthony Powell.

But of course having got through the three war books by Powell in the Dance to the Music of Time series the downward slopes were sighted and a renewed pace came into the reading.

Yet despite the determination to get through Dance to the Music of Time I rather ambitiously looked for other distractions and knocked off Rabbit, Run by John Updike and discovered a selfish America that I had not previously read about. The idea of dreams, the past and what might have been was at work in both Spies by Michael Frayn and Pincher Martin by William Golding. Both took you into a character’s mind and both left you wondering just what might have happened if other decisions had been made.

The satirical contribution to the year’s reading came from the East with Andrey Kurkov showing with Penguin Lost and The President’s Last Love that the corruption in East Europe is prime material. But when it comes to having a go at the biggest of them all, Stalin and the Soviet system, Mikhail Bulagov was in great form with A Dog’s Heart and The Fatal Eggs.

Again succumbing to the publishing hype it felt like a good time to read the Booker of Bookers and so Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie was packed in the holiday bag and dominated the last few days of my stay in France and the weeks after I returned. A book working on many levels I had to be carried along when the history escaped me but there were episodes of great story telling that were worth sticking with it for.

Powell finally came to an end with the narrator standing beside a bonfire congratulating himself on having outlasted nearly all of his contemporaries destroyed in their conquest for power.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby reminded you of just how powerful fiction can be and sadly The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson and The Lines of Fate by Mark Kharitonov were experiences of how disappointing and difficult reading can be.

But the year ended with a bit of publishing hype in the form of the average Beedle the Bard, think of the charity and it seems to have been worth paying, from J.K. Rowling and the memorable Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakamui.

I am not sure what this year holds yet in terms of ambitions. But I am sure that come the end of the month and just like 2008 a shape to the reading year will have started to emerge…

Review of the year part one

Review of 2008 part I – January to June

The year always starts with the best of intentions and in this case it began with the aim of at least matching last year’s levels of reading.

Of course that didn’t quite happen and the reason, part from the inevitable problems getting time to read consistently throughout the year, was because of the problem of getting bogged down with disappointment.

To illustrate the point the year started with The White Lioness by Henning Mankell that was bizarre. A book that not only stretched the boundaries of what was plausible but then suffered from feeling dated was not the greatest way to kick-off 2008.

That was followed with the William Golding sea-bound trilogy with Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below weaving a spell of a voyage round the world in a boat that kept threatening to sink with a mixed bunch of passengers that also threatened and chose to do the same.

There were a couple of Ian McEwan’s to get stuck into with the Cement Garden feeling like a slightly more rounded experience compared to On Chesil Beach which seemed to run into the sand at the end.

Although it got a mixed ride on lit blogs I have top confess a liking for Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris and that book will no doubt come into its own this year as the cut backs start in earnest. The other ‘current’ books included Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday and another difficult experience getting through The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks.

Angela Carter provided some odd entertainment with Wise Children and that feeling of South America came flooding in with Memories of my Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

But this year was one set to be dominated by trilogies and series with Golding being the first but then the 12 volume journey that is The Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell started and dominated a lot of reading this year.

Once the Powell books were started it did tend to dominate the reading with other books sneaked in between the volumes as breathers to provide a break and some alternative voices.

So as a result there was the chance to chime in with Powell’s build-up to London at war with some Muriel Spark, The Ballad of Peckham Rye and Girls of Slender Means. The war theme also continued with the Evelyn Waugh Sword of Honour trilogy. At times it was hard to remember exactly whose interpretation of the Second World War you were reading.

But as the summer approached there was the chance to get in the heavy tome that was Michael Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, which proved that it is always worth battling through the first 100 pages with some books. There was also the opportunity to indulge, not for the last time in the year in some publishing hype and pick up Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks.

So far sort of so good but I won’t deny the Powell was starting to become a little bit of a burden and as he entered the war years, with three books on the Second World War, I was struggling with the first couple.

Second half to follow…

Happy New Year

Wishing you all a great 2009. Hope you get some good reading in and the year delivers everything that you wished for last night on the stroke of the chimes.

Books read 2009

1. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions by Fydor Dostoevsky
2. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
3. Print is Dead - Books in the Digital Age by Jeff Gomez
4. Boy in Darkness by Mervyn Peake
5. Poor Folk and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
7. The Boy in the Striped Pjyamas by John Boyne
8. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald
9. Crabwalk by Gunter Grass
10. The Interrogation by J.L. le Clezio
11. The Human Factor by Graham Greene
12. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
13. 1974 by David Peace
14. 1977 by David Peace
15. 1980 by David Peace
16. 1983 by David Peace
17. The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith
18. The Damned United by David Peace
19. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
20. The Spire by William Golding
21. Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
22. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
23. Falling Man by Don DeLillo
24. Cosmopolis by Dan DeLillo
25. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safrer
26. Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
27. Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
28. The Russian Interpreter by Michael Frayn
29. The Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
30. The Colony by Hugo Wilcken
31. Strange Energy by Benjamin J. Myers
32. Millennium People by J.G.Ballard
33. The Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger
34. The Drowned World by J.G.Ballard
35. Lights out for the Territory by Iain Sinclair
36. Dreams from the Endz by Faiza Guene
37. Just Like Tomorrow by Faiza Guene
38. High Rise by J.G.Ballard
39. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
40. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
41. A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
42. The Twelve Chairs by Ilf & Petrov
43. The Red House by A.A. Milne
44. The Drought by JG Ballard
45. The Crystal World by JG Ballard
46. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
47. The Ancient Shore by Shirley Hazzard
48. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
49. The Tenth Man by Graham Greene
50. The Life of Monsieur Moliere by Mikhail Bulgakov
51. Journey to Nowhere by Eva Figes
52. The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
53. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
54. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
55. Lost Hearts and Other Chilling Tales by M R James
56. Legend of a Suicide by David Vann
57. Explorers of the new century by Magnus Mills
58. The Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
59. Man in the Dark by Paul Auster
60. Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill
61. Murder at the Savoy by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
62. Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
63. The Abominable Man by Maj Sjowall and Per Whaloo
64. The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas
65. The Last Englishman by Roland Chambers
66. Fire in the Blood by Irene
67. Hammerklavier by Yasmina Reza
68. The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins